A hearty cooked breakfast is usually a good enough excuse to get a pilot into a plane, but if that didn’t suffice on Sunday, the clear blue sky would have done it.

“It’s perfect, perfect weather; couldn’t be better: Not a chop in the air,” Mark Kisielius said after landing his Piper Tomahawk at the Brockville-1000 Islands Regional Tackaberry Airport for Sunday morning’s Fly-In Breakfast.

Organizers said the event brought in 40 aircraft and volunteers served some 400 breakfasts, with well over 400 visitors to the airport. The flyers came from as far afield as Peterborough.

It was a welcome change after a few years of poor weather.

As he waited to guide more arrivals on the airport grounds, Brockville Flying Club vice-president, Mike Bowen agreed it was “perfect weather for flying.”

“Clear skies, light wind, not too hot,” he added.

The breakfast is a great chance to meet up with other pilots, said Kisielius.

“We try to network a little bit and encourage some of the young people to go up,” he said.

“It’s a very expensive hobby, but it’s getting cheaper and cheaper.”

His passenger, Kim Benson, was thankful to Kisielius for taking him along.

“I’ve loved airplanes all my life but I don’t have a pilot’s licence,” said Benson.

Along with the light aircraft, Kouri's Kopters Heli Adventures was back offering helicopter tours. There were also land vehicles: Elizabethtown-Kitley firefighters were on hand with trucks on display.

Mary Jane Leslie, of Brockville, waited with her infant granddaughter while her grandson enjoyed a helicopter ride with his mom.

“It’s just exciting for all the grandchildren to see all the planes flying in and flying out,” she said.

“The fire trucks were a big hit.”

Along with the very young, the breakfast also drew in older visitors.

“I used to be a member. I learned how to fly here,” said Fred Stapper, 87, of Brockville.

The Brockville airport was a nice stop for Kirk Weekes, who flew his Cessna Cardinal RG from the Carp airport.

“When you first learn to fly, it’s one of the cross-country stops,” said Weekes, adding pilots get a stamp from the Brockville airport to show they’ve flown across the country.

Also flying in from Carp was Lance Carr, along with his flight student, Chantal Hébert. Carr built himself a Sonex plane, but has an Italian-made MW Fly engine in the small craft.

“This is the only one in the world like that,” said Carr, who enjoyed flying into Brockville.

“We just needed an excuse to get the airplane out and go flying,” he said.

“It’s a cute little airport.”

Hébert, meanwhile, is enjoying learning to fly the small Sonex craft, with all its particularities.

“It’s a little twitchy, so you really have to stay on top of it,” she said.

“And it goes fast.”

She hopes more people in the region’s aviation community will discover the Brockville airport.

“It would be fun to bring people back to Brockville because it’s a nice place,” she said.

(An earlier version of this story stated there were 36 planes at the event, a figure organizers later revised to 40.)